One of the most relevant difficulties faced by first-year undergraduate students is to settle into the educational environment of universities. This paper presents a case study that proposes a computer-assisted collaborative experience designed to help students in their transition from high school to university. This is done by facilitating their first contact with the campus and its services, the university community, methodologies and activities. The experience combines individual and collaborative activities, conducted in and out of the classroom, structured following the Jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern. A specific environment including portable technologies with network and computer applications has been developed to support and facilitate the orchestration of a flow of learning activities into a single integrated learning setting. The result is a Computer-Supported Collaborative Blended Learning scenario, which has been evaluated with first-year university students of the degrees of Software and Audiovisual Engineering within the subject Introduction to Information and Communications Technologies. The findings reveal that the scenario improves significantly students’ interest in their studies and their understanding about the campus and services provided. The environment is also an innovative approach to successfully support the heterogeneous activities conducted by both teachers and students during the scenario. This paper introduces the goals and context of the case study, describes how the technology was employed to conduct the learning scenario, the evaluation methods and the main results of the experience.

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This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation in the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI and by the Madrid regional Government in the e-Madrid project S2009/TIC-1650.

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eng

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Elsevier

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(c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. Published article available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2011.02.011

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Ensenyament assistit per ordinador -- Catalunya -- Estudi de casos

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Ensenyament -- Treball en equip -- Estudi de casos

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Interacció social -- Catalunya -- Estudi de casos

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Discovering the campus together: a mobile and computer-based learning experience

The identification and integration of reusable and customizable CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) may benefit from the capture of best practices in collaborative learning structuring. The authors have proposed ...

Portable and interactive technologies are changing the nature of collaborative learning practices. Learning can now occur both in and beyond the classroom and furthermore combine formal and informal activities monitored ...

Computer Supported Collaborative Blended Learning (CSCBL) scripts are
complex learning situations in which formal and informal activities happening in
different spatial locations are coordinated and integrated into one ...